If the protests in Sudan continue, we will be facing the possibility of a new revolutionary experience that might go beyond economic grievances (fuel prices), to touch on the political issue of the regime itself. This trend, it seems, is what the regime of Omar al-Bashir is only pushing further toward, whether by repression and muzzling voices and newspapers, or by summoning the same regurgitated talk about terrorism and conspiracies. This is taking place at a time when it seemed that the ‘Arab Spring' had stopped and reversed course. Yet this ‘belated' time can help supply a set of lessons extracted from previous experiences, subsequently allowing a measure of analysis and prediction that was not available to those experiences, which, when they exploded, were full of unexpected surprises. In this sense, we can say that Sudan, whose earlier partitioning put it in front of a major juncture, would be put by a potential revolution in front of a no less important juncture. Here too, enthusiasm for freedom and the desire to topple an abjectly failed regime, whose people are impoverished and humiliated, and whose president is wanted by the International Criminal Court, coexists with the fear of what might explode along with the explosion of freedom, that is, the explosion of what is currently repressed inside Sudan's Pandora's Box. There is nothing wrong in this regard to list the many fears, led by the fact that Sudan todays lacks the kind of unity and harmony among the factions that previously toppled the military dictatorships of Ibrahim Abboud in 1964 and Jaafar Nimeiri in 1985. Indeed, the destruction of those parties was on top of the priorities of President Omar al-Bashir since he took power in 1989, after carrying out an Islamist coup against a democratic regime. In truth, political fragmentation has crept into the Islamist party itself, out of whose ranks Bashir had emerged and in whose name he had seized power. But more importantly, the dangerous fragmentation has seeped into the Sudanese national fabric itself, something that goes way beyond the divorce with south Sudan as the path to ‘Islamic purity' that ostensibly offered salvation. In West Sudan, there is the well-known and constantly aggravating question of Darfur. There are similar issues in the east, and to a lesser extent in the south, making any political change in this country tainted to the maximum extent possible by communal tensions. Above this, there are Sudan's direct neighbors and nearby countries, which do not encourage optimism about seeing the best or the least costly outcomes emerge. Indeed, while Egypt, a country that has historical and major influence on Sudan, is preoccupied with its internal concerns resulting from the ouster of Hosni Mubarak and then Mohamed Morsi, the problem of terrorism from Yemen in the east to Libya and Chad in the West is growing worse by the day. And in addition to being surrounded by failed states, or states in difficult transition, Khartoum's relations with its southern neighbor have yet to settle on solid footing, as these relations have been marred by tension since the partition. In short, the path to transition to the post-Bashir era, should the protests escalate, will not be shorter or easier than the path traversed by the Arab countries that have beaten Sudan to revolution. Yet Bashir must fall.
